This is what I thought as well, but if you do the format thing, you wind up formatting one partition, still leaves three more to go, to of them being protected and unlabeled. So if you format C and then format D, you still have the two hidden partitions, and still have the two other partitions.

Booting off the windows DVD, didn't give the option to format a disk, is simply gave the options for install and heads right for the C partition. I have never come across anything so frustrating.

But it did get me to thinking, what happens with a catastrophic failure? Ie: dead hard drive now what, back to acer to fix, so they can reload the damned HDD with ten gallons of bloat ware?

Formatting a drive, should be a simple thing, so I thought, done it lots of times before, but holy crap, this one has turned into a hair puller. I tried Acronis, but it was to late, I had installed windows from my DVD, but had no drivers to get online for the activation portion of the set up, so that was pointless .

This is what I thought as well, but if you do the format thing, you wind up formatting one partition, still leaves three more to go, to of them being protected and unlabeled. So if you format C and then format D, you still have the two hidden partitions, and still have the two other partitions.

Booting off the windows DVD, didn't give the option to format a disk, is simply gave the options for install and heads right for the C partition. I have never come across anything so frustrating.

But it did get me to thinking, what happens with a catastrophic failure? Ie: dead hard drive now what, back to acer to fix, so they can reload the damned HDD with ten gallons of bloat ware?

Formatting a drive, should be a simple thing, so I thought, done it lots of times before, but holy crap, this one has turned into a hair puller. I tried Acronis, but it was to late, I had installed windows from my DVD, but had no drivers to get online for the activation portion of the set up, so that was pointless .

I'll have to take a look into decrapifier though great name

If say your hdd is like 120 gb.. use Gparted and delete all the partitions and just format the drive :P

If I ever get the Acer 8930-6555 that I ordered last Wednesday out of Calgary to go to Red Deer (150 km away) on the express one day delivery program from frontierpc.com, I'm thinking about doing my first ever member review. Before and after running the Decrapifier program.

Hm, you mean even if you go into windows partition manager you can't delete the partition from there? Or maybe try a 3rd party app like Acronis to do this?

I could delete the "D" partition yes, but that simply left me with a 130 gig void on the drive. , I could sort of make the "D" partition a little bigger or smaller using partition magic, but not by much.

I may go back and try acronis again, once we get the "Acer" disks so that if it doesn't work then the machine can be restored. As it turns out now, we are still stuck with a lappy that get's stuck at a black screen with the flashing cursor.

So fast forward to last night, the misses called Acer support, and after 45 minuets got a real voice, who told her, "Acer does not support repartitioning the hard" I am sure he menat the company not the machine. So after arguing with the fool for a bit, and trying to convince him that the machine is being restored from the "restore partition" on the hard drive, but refuses to boot fully. They are suppossed to send along to "real" Acer restore disks. So heads up to anyone getting an Acer lap top, there is acctual "ACER" disks, but they don't seem inclined to include them in the box.

Once the real disks get here, I'll be more likely to try a little more hard love with this machine, untill then I pretty much have a nice doorstop, woohoo!

Gah that's ultra sucky! First thing I did when I got my XPS laptop was reformat it. Had zero probs except my n00bness with Vista at the time. Well at least they are sending you the disks. Let us know what happens.

ummm ok so smallish update, got on the phone to tech support once again, booted up the laptop, and expected to see to flashing cursor deal again, but this time, as we are talking to the tech support girl, damn machines boots up just fine as soon as she mentions the possibility of having to send it in hmmmmmmm just love computers sometimes. Anyways still waiting for the magic disks to come from Acer before attempting anything else with this tempermental toad.